Invidious: add YouTube Music functionality

[chaosmonk1]

YouTube Music (music.youtube.com) allows browsing of music videos by artist and album. Combined with Invidious's audio-only playback feature and the ability to download videos, this functionality could make Invidious a great tool for streaming music.

From what I can gather, each artist page on music.youtube corresponds to a channel on www.youtube called "[name of artist] - Topic",

https://music.youtube.com/channel/UCBfv87kvVXyNi88URZ1zvCA
https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCBfv87kvVXyNi88URZ1zvCA

each album corresponds to a playlist under that channel,

https://music.youtube.com/playlist?list=OLAK5uy_mG7L8RFMqnoG1htkhjMaXVPWY4xWHV_9U
https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=OLAK5uy_mG7L8RFMqnoG1htkhjMaXVPWY4xWHV_9U

and both the www.youtube and music.youtube pages display related artists, but music.youtube presents a different interface to the information. A "music.invidio.us" counterpart to music.youtube.com could do something similar with the same channels and playlists.

[dimqua]

Would be nice to have something similar to NoiseQ or Tubeats, both services are intended to stream music from YouTube.

[chaosmonk1]

It seems that "* - Topic" channels are already identified as auto-generated and handled differently.

src/invidious/channels.cr:

  # Auto-generated channels
  # https://support.google.com/youtube/answer/2579942
  if author.ends_with?(" - Topic") ||
     {"Popular on YouTube", "Music", "Sports", "Gaming"}.includes? author
    auto_generated = true
  end

I don't understand exactly how autogenerated channels are dealt with, but on invidio.us such channels do not appear display any content,

https://invidio.us/channel/UCBfv87kvVXyNi88URZ1zvCA

so perhaps they are just ignored. I'm not at all familiar with Crystal and can't follow the code well enough to see where this happens and how albums and similar artists could be extracted instead.

[omarroth]

Currently genre channels are empty since they themselves don't technically have any videos. I think I mentioned in #183 that they will instead show the contents from the auto-generated playlists associated with the channel.

I personally am not familiar with YouTube Music or the other two services that were linked. What specific functionality would need to be implemented? Currently the only thing mentioned is a similar interface to YouTube Music.

This seems out of scope to me, but I would be happy to be convinced otherwise. There's numerous other projects specifically for this purpose, including the two are linked, so I'm having trouble understanding how this would be integrated with the rest of the project.

[dimqua]

What specific functionality would need to be implemented?

A possibility to create your own playlists and play them whatever you like, e.g. in shuffle, loop, audio-only modes and/or in background. At least, this is what NewPipe currently provides.

[chaosmonk1]

What specific functionality would need to be implemented?

• searching by artist or album
• “similar artists” recommendations

(I think that these would be useful API calls, regardless of how they are integrated into Invidious’s interface.)

I'm having trouble understanding how this would be integrated with the rest of the project.

YouTube doesn’t really integrate these features into its basic features, but maintains two interfaces: www.youtube.com, which displays channels and videos, and music.youtube.com, which displays artists and albums. The two interfaces share a back-end, but they present a different subset of YouTube’s data and functionality. However, Invidious would not have to do it this way. Invidious’s design is already superior to YouTube’s in many ways, and this could be another. Video content (channels and videos) and music content (artists and albums) could exist alongside each other, with an option to filter one’s search to one or the other.

This seems out of scope to me, but I would be happy to be convinced otherwise.

As a feature of YouTube, it seems within the scope of providing an alternative front-end to YouTube. Admittedly, it’s not one of YouTube’s better-known features, but I think this is a result of their failure to integrate it into the existing YouTube experience. If they (or Invidious) did a better job at this I think it would be very popular.

There's numerous other projects specifically for this purpose, including the two are linked

The two linked appear to be proprietary, and I don't know of any similar projects with their own API like Invidious's. As far as I know, Invidious would be the first project to provide this functionality (1) using only free software and (2) without using YouTube's API.

[omarroth]

For the sake of completeness, there's also s-kris/rey, which is licensed under the GPL and uses the official YouTube API.

To summarize requested functionality:

• [ ] Custom playlists #114
• [x] Fix handling of "* - topic" channels #183
• [x] Add /playlists endpoint to UI and API
• [ ] Add search filters for albums/artists (likely hooking into internal endpoints used by music.youtube.com)

If there is something I missed feel free to mention it below. I will likely implement the requested features in the order I listed them.

[dimqua]

@omarroth currently it's not possible to import/export custom playlists to/from NewPipe. Only the subscriptions list.

[chaosmonk1]

For the sake of completeness, there's also s-kris/rey, which is licensed under the GPL and uses the official YouTube API.

This does not appear to search by album/artist, or even specifically for music. Non-music videos show up just as in a regular YouTube search. The difference from youtube.com appears to be better playlist management and audio-only playback, but nothing that overlaps with this feature request.

If there is something I missed feel free to mention it below.

The only thing missing is being able to view the "Fans might also like" artists at the bottom of each artists page.

Thanks for considering this feature request.

[Gert-dev]

Is this also the ticket tracking that none of the - Topic videos currently seem to play on Invidious?

I searched through the tickets, but didn't find any ticket really mentioning that these videos don't actually seem to work at all (which isn't really the same as displaying the channels).

It seems that any video I open from a - Topic channel plays - I always get the "either a network error, mime type is not supported, ..." error for them. Other videos seem to work fine. Am I perhaps missing something I need to enable (on Firefox)? I can create a new ticket if this is a different problem.

[omarroth]

I'd recommend opening a new issue, you might also take a look at #92 and #151. Would you mind including an example of the channel you're watching from, and a video that is showing the "network error, ...".

[Kezxo]

If there is something I missed feel free to mention it below.

Adding shuffle to existing youtube playlists would be awesome, maybe repeat/loop while we're at it.

[Gert-dev]

Band or artist pages, sometimes - but apparently not always - named <Artist - Topic, show their albums as playlists on the playlists page on YouTube. On Invidious, these don't appear to show up. On some "topic" channels, the playlists are just empty.

I _think_, but am not sure, that this used to work, but it doesn't anymore, perhaps due to YouTube API changes.

Examples:

• First example, an implicit "Topic" channel which is not named <Artist> - Topic - only the (currently) five explicitly created playlists are shown, but not the "Albums and singles" shown below on the matching YouTube page.
• Second example, an explicit "Topic" channel - the page is empty on Invidious, but on the matching YouTube page the albums and artists are shown.

183 and/or #1241 may be related.

[GitSuggestions]

This would help me a lot right now. More precisely, new API endpoints based on how videos are organized in music.youtube.com, e.g. /songs, /albums, /singles, /videos etc.